I must give my medical testimony to the truth herein conveyed. Work does give exhilaration of spirits and enables a girl truly to enjoy recreation and outdoor exercise, and, moreover, the busy day results in calm refreshing sleep at night.
Without sleep, without perfect exercise, ventilation of rooms and fresh air everywhere, no girl can grow up happy and healthful.
Coddling children and keeping them too warm causes them to become fragile and delicate, with no nerves worth mentioning, except when they give rise to the tortures of toothache and neuralgia, and no lungs good enough to last.
There is, mother, but a sad future for that girl who is ashamed to soil her fingers by doing honest work, or ashamed to wear a thimble and wield woman’s real weapon—the needle.
But it is not natural for girls to hate work. Do they not make the best of nurses, for instance, and the most gentle-handed? It is Scott who says—
“Oh, woman, in our hours of ease,
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
And variable as the shade
By the light and quivering aspen made,
When pain and anguish wring the brow,